You know all about Steve Jobs. He was the face of Apple, iconic black shirt and all.

But who gave us the first actual face of Apple — that iconic grin?

It was Susan Kare.

PLoS Blogs had a very interesting look at her contribution to the Macintosh GUI.

Here are some pieces of pixels you may recognize:

Susan Kare designed the first proportionally spaced font family that was much different than the monospace fonts that dominated the scene.

Kare was put to task to design the Mac’s GUI, but since no app had been created for designing icons, she headed to the art supply store and grabbed a $2.50 sketchbook and began to create the Macintosh interface:

Pretty cool, right?

Kare’s approach to icon creation is something we can all learn from. She didn’t think of an icon as an illustration, but as a symbol of communication, much like a street sign.

It’s inspiring to see how these icons were birthed, all from a $2.50 sketchbook. It can be easy to think we need just the right app or download the perfect plugin to make all the difference in our media communication. We can see from here, that’s got nothing to do with.